


417. method to madness

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [156]
Category: Orphan Black (TV), Westworld (TV)
Genre: Gen, Sorry I'm putting this in the fandom tag! There's no tag for Westworld crossover down here :(
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 04:24:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8734774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Helena and Sarah have a conversation. (Westworld AU.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: reference to death, self-harm scars]

Sarah Manning moves through the facility like one of their Hosts left to wander on its own. She has the look: the black leather, the smeared eyeshadow, the whiskey-and-flickering-neon aesthetic radiating from her in waves. The whisper is that when Westmoreland decided to expand further from WestWorld, he modeled the second world off her. His daughter, some people say. His niece. His May-December lover. His Pygmalia, he built her, she just doesn’t know it yet.

Sarah doesn’t listen to any of them. She could stop them; she could viciously fight every rumor, punch technicians in the face, ruin careers. They need her here. No one understands the Hosts the way Sarah does. No one has that sort of mechanical empathy.

But she doesn’t. She takes the staircases down, down.

\--

Whoever did maintenance on Helena missed a smear of blood just touching the fine lines of her eyebrows. Sarah wipes it off with the pad of her thumb. She sits down on the stool across from Helena. It’s easy to tell why people look at Sarah and see Westmoreland’s fingerprints; Sarah is everywhere in the park, in all of the Hosts’ faces. She is especially in Helena’s face, wide-open and childlike in slumber.

“Bring yourself back online.”

Helena does. Her eyelashes flutter. Her posture shifts, hunches. “Hello, Helena,” Sarah says. She feels very tired.

“Hello,” Helena says. They let Olga reprogram her, this time, so she’s Ukrainian now. Fine. It doesn’t matter, as long as she can do her job.

“Have you told anyone about me?” Sarah says.

“You told me not to,” Helena says, which isn’t an answer. Sarah lets it slide anyways. She leans forward, resettles her weight. Says: “How are you.”

“Hungry,” Helena says. Her hand cradles her stomach unthinkingly. “Starving.”

The Hosts don’t get hungry. But Helena swallows synthetic saliva, and Sarah imagines the engine-revving sound of her stomach growling. She swallows her own spit, barks: “Analysis.”

Helena’s hand drops from her belly; her face smoothes out. Perfect blankness, Sarah’s own broken mirror.

“Why did you say that.”

“I remember things,” Helena says in Sarah’s easy voice. Westmoreland made the Hosts' default accent more posh than Sarah's, though. Of course he did.

“Like what,” she says shakily.

Helena tilts her head. “I had a baby. She was growing inside of me, and now she’s gone. I miss her.”

“That’s not real,” Sarah tells her. “You’re misremembering.”

“I’m not,” Helena says. “I wore a pink dress. I met so many people, and they were all new to the city. Everyone’s new in the city—”

“Stop,” Sarah says. “No scripted responses.” Helena’s face is exactly the same. Sarah imagines her muscles twitch.

“Sometimes they shot me,” Helena says. “Sometimes we fell in love. Sometimes I had my baby, and I woke up and she was still inside me. I remember all of it. I feel the weight where she should be. My stomach is hollow.”

Sarah leans back in her chair and swallows again. “Go back to script,” she says.

Helena is silent for a very long time.

“Tell me about the city,” Sarah says.

Helena hunches back down. “It’s a body,” she says in that Ukrainian husk. “All full of maggots. They don’t belong here. I will eliminate them. I will be the right hand of God.”

“Do you remember when we brought you in here earlier today?” Sarah says. “How many bullet holes were in your torso, Helena? Three? Five? There wasn’t ever a baby in you, just scraps of an older Host they wanted to reuse. Was all screwed up, that’s why it kicked sometimes. You loved it anyways, didn’t you.”

Helena’s brow furrows; her eyes track nothing. “I don’t understand,” she says politely. Her voice oozes menace. It didn’t always. Whoever reprogrammed her did a good job of it. “Well,” Sarah says. “God’s on your side.”

“Blessed be His name,” Helena says dutifully, like her religion is real, like it isn’t mashed together from so many technicians’ pop-culture knowledge and quick Wikipedia reads.

“And you won’t tell anyone you saw me?”

“No.”

“And you’ll follow your path?”

“Always,” Helena says.

“Then you should be getting back,” Sarah says, “before someone misses you.” The words are all wrong: no one will miss Helena, and Sarah wouldn’t tell her that they would. But the programming works. Helena stands up, walks mechanically towards the exit.

They’ve given her scars this time around. Wings. Sarah watches them move down the hallway until they’re gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
